Our Medicine, SBS review: Indigenous medical services and the gaps that should shame us

New SBS documentary series Our Medicine wastes absolutely no time letting the audience know it’s not going to be yet another fly-on-the-wall medical series.

‘From the early days of colonisation,’ says narrator Leah Purcell, ‘First Nations people in Australia have been locked in a catastrophic cycle of poor health outcomes.’ And things aren’t getting any better. As one health professional puts it: ‘the gaps we need to see changing, aren’t changing.’

What follows across the six half-hour episodes is a sweeping look at Indigenous medical services across Australia. Most of the patients we see are Indigenous; so are the doctors, nurses, paramedics and traditional healers.

While their ailments and injuries might overlap with the wider community, the outcomes are markedly different. Life expectancy for First Nations peoples in Australia is approximately eight years lower than that of non-indigenous Australians, largely due to a higher incidence of chronic heart and lung diseases as well as diabetes.

Our Medicine: the known and unknown

Episode one looks at a night in the emergency department at Cairns and Hinterland hospital, where Dr Tatum Bond deals with the unknown across her entire shift – starting with an airlifted in patient who’s been attacked with a machete. It’s not an unknown injury; a lot of warring families were placed on the same land during the Stolen Generations, with disputes going back a hundred years or more. It may not affect the medical outcome, but as Bond says, ‘it’s important to acknowledge that not all of these communities are meant to be together’.

Watch the Our Medicine trailer.

All the usual pleasures of a medical series are here. Patients come in, we learn about their injuries and how they acquired them, the medical staff treating them talk to camera about what’s going on and what’s going to happen. It’s the Indigenous angle that makes it all fresh, whether it’s the background to the injuries or, as we see in later episodes, the use of traditional healing methods (watch out for Green Ant Therapy) alongside conventional medicine.

The series takes in a wide range of settings, from remote communities to small towns to larger population centres. Emergency departments and paramedics are a big part of the focus, but there’s more preventative medicine as well.

Shaun Tatipata conducts eye checks across the Northern Territory as the founder of the countries only Indigenous eye care provider, while Indigenous eye surgeon Associate Professor Kris Rallah-Baker joins him to perform multiple cataract surgeries in a day.

Our Medicine: rapport

A big part of traditional medicine is listening. Again and again the importance of making a connection and building a rapport between healer and patient is stressed. Imparting information in a way that’s culturally sensitive is also important – the point is to make sure the patient understands and accepts what’s going to happen, rather than the more paternal model often found in conventional Western medicine.

Another thing that’s stressed across the series is the poor health outcomes for Indigenous Australians, with Purcell often dropping in one alarming statistic or another about the terrible state of the current system.

Tatipata’s eye checks are accompanied by the fact that Indigenous people over the age of 40 have six times the rate of blindness compared to other Australians, with over 90% of those cases treatable.

There’s a toll as well on the medical professionals. In a later episode, paramedic Wade Munns talks about the challenges that come with providing medical care to a small community where you know many of the locals, and where each callout – in this particular case, to a 70-year-old woman who’s had multiple falls – could be to someone you have a personal connection with.

Despite the at times grim statistics, this thoughtful and insightful series also has moments of hope. Patients are healed, community is strengthened, and the medicos can take comfort in a job well done. Our Medicine is a look at a system that desperately needs improvement and resources, and it doesn’t shy away from the many problems being faced.

On an individual level, the people we see are doing an astounding job. The best thanks they could get would be a system that builds on their work to create a better result for all.

Our Medicine premieres on 29 May 2025 and screens on Thursdays at 7.30pm on SBS, NITV and SBS On Demand.

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